


Velvet Paws Hide Sharp Claws

by ink_magpie



Series: Daisies for the Queen of the Dead [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: 18th Century, Attempted Seduction, Blood, Bodice-Ripper, Dark, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Erotica, F/M, Gothic, Historical, Historical References, Hunters & Hunting, Imperial Russia, Magical Realism, Older Man/Younger Woman, One Shot, Original Character(s), Rating: M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Romance, Seduction, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 12:21:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17528609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ink_magpie/pseuds/ink_magpie
Summary: The Empress' Grand Master of the Hunt always catches his prey.  As winter returns to St Petersburg, wolves prowl the streets - as does Count Kuritsa, who has his eye on seducing a shy yet alluring new arrival at court...





	Velvet Paws Hide Sharp Claws

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in a series of original short stories I'm playing around with - stories of seduction set in different times and places. Who knows where (and when) this crazy train's headed. ;-)
> 
> All rights reserved.

When the savage north wind returned each winter, so did the wolves.  From their forest dens their dark snouts could smell the feasting in the city, and they would emerge at night to prowl the frozen streets of St Petersburg.  Ruthless and half-starved, they rarely left empty-bellied, filling their stomachs with whatever they could find.  Sometimes they found bones left outside a busy kitchen – sticky with frayed meat and marrow – and sometimes they chanced upon meat that was still warm; a drunk sleeping in a doorway, a well-stocked stable perhaps, or even a small child.

                When the winter sun lumbered over the horizon and the cathedral bells moaned, the city stirred from one nightmare only to find another.  Guards who had risen early to relieve the night-watchmen of their shift found nothing more to relieve than bloodied boot prints and shashka half-submerged in the snow.  Gentlemen left the balls and the brothels at dawn in sleighs pulled by one less horse than the night before.  And mothers awoke to find the cradles beside their beds silent, and empty. 

                There was one man however, who feasted on the fear that came with the stars at dusk.  As Grand Master of the Hunt, Count Kuritsa passed fluidly from ballroom to birch forest and back again; hunting sable to delight the Empress, deer to feed the feast, and brawling with bears and stalking wolves purely for his own pleasure.  Whilst some men liked to gamble or attend the opera, the Count liked to kill.  He anticipated the arrival of winter and its wolves like a starving man at a banquet; hungry and eager to gorge. 

                The reap of the previous winter had been good.  He’d picked off an entire pack of grey wolves one by one, and had sold on their frosty pelts for an excellent price.  Even the meat had not been waisted; with it, he’d baited and brought down a female brown bear which now warmed the floorboards at the foot of his bed.

Although hunting wolves had earned him enough gold to maintain a small blue palace on the Fontanka and favour with the Empress, nothing satisfied the Count more than spilling blood and claiming the pelt of an animal as violent and as calculating as he was.

                But one wolf had escaped him that winter; a lone wolf – stray from the pack – with a slashed paw.  The Count had never seen it, but its mark and its scent were all over the city.  It snubbed the rotting scraps the other wolves sought for fresher meat; meat that still moved.

                Savage and smart, this wolf posed an irresistible challenge.  The Count had stalked it for miles and miles across the snowy fields, following its distinctive slashed tracks as they led him on playful loops around the forest.  He’d pluck soft, brown and grey clumps of its coat that he found snagged on the trunks of trees and would chuckle whenever he discovered that one of the traps that he’d set for the wolf had been purposely tripped or even destroyed.

But eventually Spring came, and when the snow melted away, so did the tracks.  The wolf had disappeared.

To the Count it was more than just a missed opportunity.  It was a failure.  Being outsmarted by a wild animal had dealt a frustrating knock to his ego.  And so, he’d waited all year for winter to return, just so he could settle the score.

                When the Neva finally froze and the first invitations to the winter balls and masques found their way to his desk, the Count cleaned his rifle, sharpened his hunting knife and prepared his traps.  Wrapped in a heavy, bear skin coat and accompanied by his hounds, he left the city every morning – when the sun was low – and set out across the fields and into the forest.  He counted every set of tracks he found pressed into the snow and characterised them by the shape and the size of each print, desperately hoping to find some sign that his lone wolf had returned.

                When night fell, he left his traps and – after a warming drink and a change of clothes – attended the balls and the banquets across the city.  In mirrored rooms lit by candlelight, ladies danced in diamonds that rivalled the icicles outside, whilst gentlemen watched on through a haze of tobacco smoke.  And as the stars spiralled overhead and the wolves howled outside, laughter and music filled the hallways and the drawing rooms.

                It was during the first balls of winter – when the snow was fresh and the cellars full – that the Count first noticed Natasha Dashkova. 

A young and delicate beauty, she was like the last rose of summer; a timid bud, late to blossom and yet unspoiled by the frost.  She rooted herself to the walls and stood so still watching others dance that a small bird might have mistaken her for a statue and made a nest in the smooth hollow of her collarbone. 

                With grey in his beard and the devil in his ribs – and weary of waiting for his wolf – the Count sought immediately to have her.  Her pelt would warm his bed nicely, he decided.

                He stalked her first, watching her from the other side of every room they shared, and like the wolves, he slowly began to characterise her by what he saw. 

                He noted that she was poor – probably the only daughter of a middling noble – as unlike the other ladies he knew, who owned trunks full of gowns in as many shades as there were flavours of pastila, she owned only one; a plain satin gown in a shade lost somewhere between silver and blue.  Her neck was always bare of diamonds, and her pale brown hair was pinned loosely in simple curls (the best she could manage without a lady’s maid, he imagined).  She didn’t care for the pale wine being served because she turned away every glass she was offered with a shy wave of her gloved hand.  And although she never danced, it was clear to him that she wanted to from the way her skirts would sway to the music like curtains caught in breeze.

                It was at a masquerade in the Winter Palace that the Count ceased stalking and began his seduction.  When he found her hovering near a frosted window – peering nervously through the simple veil of black lace she wore across her eyes – he walked over with his glass of wine, approaching as slowly as he would in the forests outside Petersburg when his rifle was trained on a deer.  There were no twigs to snap beneath his boot as he crossed the chequerboard tiles of the ballroom however, and his quarry had little idea she was being advanced upon until his shadow was looming over her.

                Natasha blinked up at him through the lace.

He smiled down at her.  “I’ve never known anyone to attend a masque and spend the entire evening staring out of the window,” he remarked gruffly.

                Her pink lips curled ever so slightly.

                “Either the guards are staging a coup,” he said, stepping alongside her and peering through the window himself, “or… you’re bored.”

                She looked down, twisting her hands.  “…Not bored.  Just lonely,” she replied with a sigh.  There was a provincial lilt to her voice that the Count couldn’t place.  “I don’t know anyone.”

                The Count took a sip of his wine, eyeing her over the rim.  “…Allow me to remedy that,” he told her, offering up his palm.

                She recoiled from it at first – glaring down at it as if it posed some danger to her – before timidly placing her own hand inside it.

                Count Kuritsa grasped her fingers.  Even through the lace gloves, they felt as cold as if they’d been submerged in icy waters of the Neva.  “Count Alexander Nikolajevich Kuritsa,” he said as he stooped to kiss her curled knuckles. 

                She blushed.  “…Natalya Dashkova.”

                The Count hummed.  “…Natasha,” he repeated, tasting the sound of her familiar name on his lips.

Natasha looked down, her lashes brushing her cheeks.

“You’re not from Petersburg, are you?  Nor Moscow, I think,” the Count said.

                She glanced sharply at him, the blue of her irises shining through the slashes in the black lace.  “…How can you tell?” she asked him.

                The Count raised his eyebrows and amused himself with her naivety.  The list of clues was endless.  “…Because if you were, we’d be well-acquainted by now,” he explained bluntly, gesturing with his glass of wine, “as I am with all the beautiful ladies at court.”

                Natasha smiled helplessly, a blush rising behind the black lace.

                He asked her to dance with him, and although it took a gentle nudge to get her to agree, by the time the first dance rolled to its end she wasn’t ready to stop and wanted to dance them all – which she did, all night.  And like that late summer rose bud – once opened – she dazzled everyone.  People pointed and whispered and wondered where she’d come from and who she was.

                When the time came for the Count to leave with his rifle and check the traps that he’d laid, he bid farewell to Natasha with kiss to her cheek; hot and pink from dancing.

                That night, the Count cornered a wolf on the way back to his palace.  A small and gangling beast with yellow eyes.  He carried it back over his shoulder, and along the way – not far from his home – stumbled upon the familiar slashed tracks of the lone wolf he’d been waiting for, its mark in the fresh snow like the waxy seal of a letter.

 

* * *

 

 

As winter progressed, only two things occupied the Count’s thoughts; the lone wolf, and Natasha.  And while he continued to follow his old foe through the streets of Petersburg by daylight, when night fell he came in from the snow and sought Natasha out in the warmth; every evening taking a small, cautious step closer to her.  They danced at the Imperial Ball, shared a box at the opera, and he spent several nights teaching her how to play cards.

                At Christmas – to her surprise and excitement – he gave her a diamond collar.

They were sat alone in the back of his sleigh when he pulled it from the pocket of his coat.  Her eyes lit up from the inside, like the bright windows of the cathedral before a service.  “…I’ve never worn diamonds before,” she told him, reaching out to touch the sparkling chain dangling from his fingertips.  She tapped it with the tip of her finger and watched as it swung, curling and dancing like a fish on a hook.

“And now you shall,” he replied, lifting the collar over her head and fastening the blue, satin ribbon in a bow at the nape of her neck.

                She turned to face him, holding her head high.  “…Well?” she asked him, grinning.

                “…You wear them well,” he told her with a smirk, deciding that he’d quite enjoy seeing her in the diamonds and nothing else.  “When I catch that wolf, you’ll have a pair of earrings to match,” he promised.

                Natasha narrowed her blue eyes.  “…I think you’re selling the pelt before you’ve killed the wolf,” she warned him.

                He stretched his arm over the back of the sleigh and around her, enveloping her in the snow-flecked fur of his bear-skin coat.  “I’ll kill it soon enough,” he told her confidently.  “…But I won’t sell it.  Not this one.”

“Why not?” she asked him.

“This one will warm my bed,” he explained, “to serve as a nightly reminder of my triumph.”

                The Count reached up and cupped her neck, brushing his thumb across the collar of diamonds gleaming in the dark.  He admired them silently for a moment, then kissed her.  Not the chaste cheek kisses of early winter, nor the tender embraces enjoyed at the foot of the stairs at the end of an evening, it was a kiss of savage intent; hungry, impulsive, violent even – smothering, tearing flesh with teeth and groaning at the pleasure of it.    And while she might have hesitated before, she’d grown used to the feeling of his lips on hers and his hand heavy on her body.  She’d come to expect it and to even hope for it, in much the same way that everyone had come to expect to wake up and see a blanket of fresh snow on the ground each morning.

                Bolstered, the Count reached down and grabbed a fist-full of her skirt.  He raised the petticoats onto her lap, exposing her thighs to the cold, night air.

She baulked a little when his hand moved upwards, along her stockings and over her satin garters.  And the pad of his thumb traced the warm, wet apex of her thighs in much the same way that it had grazed over the diamonds around her neck, she gasped and pulled back.  Her thighs clamped around his hand like a snare snapping shut.

 

* * *

 

As the old year changed into the new one, Count Kuritsa felt he was growing ever closer to killing the lone wolf, and bedding Natasha.  While the scraps of goose and pork from Christmas he’d left in the courtyard outside his palace had attracted a couple of smaller wolves _(whom the Count had shot and killed from his bedroom window)_ , the lone wolf, he found, could not be baited.  And while the tracks could be found pacing near the gate, they could never be enticed to come inside.  Instead, they’d tramp off in search of other prey, which quite often turned out to be a waif or a wanderer.  Fresh corpses – ripped apart like cheap fabric – along with the bright red brush strokes in the snow angered the Empress, who complained that her Grand Master of the Hunt had fallen short and was perhaps not as skilled as she’d been made to believe.

As the festival of Maslenitsa approached, the nights grew a little shorter and the snow began to thin, and the Count became impatient.  He realised his chances of finding and killing the wolf were fading.  Soon daylight would reign and the snow would melt and he was sure that the wolf would disappear once again.  He became frustrated, lashing out at his hounds and snapping at his servants.

At the last masquerade of winter, Natasha comforted him.  She was more beautiful that night than any other, he noted.  In full bloom, she was warm and lively, and danced all night until she was out of breath and her hair had fallen from its pins.  At the end of the evening when he offered to take her back to his palace, he was surprised when she agreed.

Behind the closed doors of his bed chamber and in the dark, she stepped out of her gown like a butterfly from a chrysalis.  Dressed only in her stockings and diamonds, the Count was pleased with what he saw.

                When she offered him her hands – finally divested of the gloves she always wore – he took them and turned them over; pressing a kiss to the blue veins along her wrist.  For the first time, he noticed a deep scar entrenched along the palm of her hand.  Angry and red.

                “…Is this why you always wear gloves?” he asked as he pulled her arm over his shoulder and brought her body against his.

                “…An accident.  I touched something I shouldn’t have when I was a child.  I didn’t know it was so dangerous,” she told him with a shrug as she tilted her head upwards and seized his lips.

                Once in bed she surprised him with her ardour.  The timid girl of early winter was gone; replaced by a woman more beast than bride.  She canted on top of him until she came, then pressed her body limply against his.

                “…Did you ever catch your wolf?” she asked him, pressing her hands against his chest.

                He grunted, angry once again.  “Not yet,” he told her, brushing the hair from her frosty blue eyes and running his hand down her flank.

                “Perhaps it’s hunting _you_ , instead,” she suggested, sitting astride him.

                The Count chuckled beneath her, loud and deep.

                “…Watching you,” she went on, looking down at him as she stroked a hand across her diamond collar and between her breasts.  “…Teasing you.  Waiting for the right moment to _finally_ strike.”

                Count Kuritsa frowned at her as she unwittingly rubbed salt in his sores, baited him like the bears he hunted.  “It’s a game,” he said, grabbing her hips.  “And I _never_ lose.”

                Natasha smirked at him, baring her teeth.  “…Neither do I,” she whispered.

The Count gazed up at her in horror as she arched her spine and her pale skin sprouted a coat of brown and grey fur.  Her short nose grew into a snarling snout and her hands shrunk into paws.  When the transformation was complete, she pounced, digging her claws into his chest and flicking her tail like smoke swirling from a cigar.  All that was left of Natasha was the icy flash in her blue eyes, and the diamond collar around her neck.

                The Count screamed as she attacked, tearing him open with her teeth and feasting on his heart.

                When it was done, she left the city and returned to the forest with blood on her lips and diamonds around her neck.


End file.
